oped
enough pressure to get whatever appropriations it wanted, even over
Presidential veto. It created the only space experts, which meant that
the men placed in government agencies to regulate it came from its own
ranks.

The other lobbies learned a lot from Space.

There had been a medical lobby long before, but it had been a
conservative group, mostly concerned with protecting medical autonomy
and ethics. It also tried to prevent government control of treatment and
payment, feeling that it couldn't trust the people to know where to
stop. But its history was a long series of retreats.

It fought what it called socialized medicine. But the people wanted
their troubles handled free--which meant by government spending, since
that could be added to the national debt, and thus didn't seem to cost
anything. It lost, and eventually the government paid most medical
costs, with doctors working on a fixed fee. Then quantity of treatment
paid, rather than quality. Competence no longer mattered so much. The
Lobby lost, but didn't know it--because the lowered standards of
competence in the profession lowered the caliber of men running the
political aspects of that profession as exemplified by the Lobby.

It took a world-wide plague to turn the tide. The plague began in old
China; anything could start there, with more than a billion people
huddled in one area and a few madmen planning to conquer the world. It
might have been a laboratory mutation, but nobody could ever prove it.

It wiped out two billion people, depopulated Africa and most of Asia,
and wrecked Europe, leaving only America comparatively safe to take
over. An obscure scientist in one of the laboratories run by the Medical
Lobby found a cure before the first waves of the epidemic hit America.
Rutherford Ryan, then head of the Lobby, made sure that Medical Lobby
got all the credit.

By the time the world recovered, America ran it and the Medical Lobby
was untouchable. Ryan made a deal with Space Lobby, and the two
effectively ran the world. None of the smaller lobbies could buck them,
and neither could the government.

There was still a president and a congress, as there had been a Senate
under the Roman Caesars. But the two Lobbies ran themselves as they
chose. The real government had become a kind of oligarchy, as it always
did after too much false democracy ruined the ideals of real and
practical self-rule. A man belonged to his Lobby, just as a serf had
be